Is electricity consumption of Chinese counties decoupled from carbon emissions? A study based on Tapio decoupling index

Abstract

China has set more ambitious targets for controlling carbon emissions and poverty reduction at the end of 2020. In order to analyze China's experience in poverty reduction and CO2 emission reduction and to provide guidance for fulfilling its emission reduction commitments and consolidating poverty reduction achievements simultaneously in the future, this paper introduces the Tapio decoupling index to study the relationship between electricity consumption and CO2 emissions in more than 600 Chinese counties from 2009 to 2016. The results show that more counties decoupled their electricity consumption from CO2 emissions in 2016 than in 2009. Then Logit model is proposed and the results show that poverty-stricken counties are more likely to decouple electricity consumption from CO2 emissions than non-poverty-stricken counties, which suggests that China's poverty-stricken counties are not pursuing economic development at the cost of loosening carbon emission controls. This paper also finds that as the carbon intensity of the secondary industry has declined significantly in recent years, the development of secondary industry could help decouple electricity consumption from CO2 emission, and the promotion of renewable energy can play the same role.